That was the year that was: 365 days with the new Episerver

Thursday, March 10, 2016

In 2015 I spent less than three months at home in Southern California. In 2015 I racked up an unenviable 150,000 miles on United Airlines alone – air stewards on UA935 would welcome me back on board as “James” as if some favorite cousin. Some of my trips last year were close on three months long and on occasion took in more than 20 cities. Needless to say, it’s not something I relish doing again this year (even if my United Mileage Plus account already sits at close to 30,000 miles for 2016), but you see – I was on a mission.

We are on a mission at Episerver. That may sound a little trite and possibly pompous but that’s just the way it is. We’re not trying to solve world peace but we are working tirelessly to positively improve the working lives of the people we serve. We fundamentally believe we have the best product in our market. We call it the Episerver Digital Experience Cloud™ which provides one single platform to manage content, marketing and commerce all in the cloud, and allows people to take control of the digital experience easily, cost effectively, and enjoyably.

We are very excited about that, and here’s why.

At Episerver, we envisage a future where our customer’s ideas can be effortlessly realized in an instant. Everyone at Episerver is working to diminish the difference between the thoughts our customers have - and their ability to execute them.

At the end of the day our promise to customers and our partners, is that technology, when done right, should make you feel like you have super powers. Quite simply, Episerver gives you the tools to make your work easy, effective and rewarding.

Enough of our mission and why it excites us, and instead back to my year that was. So much happened in 2015 for the new Episerver, you could fill a book, but instead here’s a few highlights of I think time well spent.

January: On January 27th 2015 we announced the merger of two substantial CMS companies in Ektron and EPiServer and in that news release we said we would protect customer’s investments, extend the value of them, and over the course of the year would converge the best of them into a single platform. The competition scoffed, it had never been done before they said and so it was a simply a pipe dream. On the contrary, customers should leave the sinking ship!

April: Well, we got out on the road and carried out a 22 city customer and partner Spring Roadshow, of which I attended every single one. We met any concerns head on and we clearly laid out our mission and goals for the company. I’m proud to say that one year later we have not deviated from them one bit. Customers and partners appreciated it too, and I formed a lot of strong relationships along the way.

May: We introduced the new brand for our offering. No longer would it be Ektron CMS or Episerver CMS but the “Digital Experience Cloud” and with it we introduced the industries first true .NET PaaS offering with a sensible business metric based consumption pricing model. We’ve since provided this service to customers in all types of industry all over the world.

July: For the first time in our 20-year history, the new Episerver achieved leader status in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for web content management (WCM), with the independent research firm paying tribute to our mission saying “Customers regard Episerver highly as a product designed for the future of WCM in the age of digital business.” Knowing how important our customer references were to this achievement, it was a tremendous accolade and validation for us, and something we’re all very proud of at Episerver.

October: The new Episerver debuted a major new brand platform, website and identity with a new logo to boot, all expressing our core values of simplicity, dependability and collaboration. And we launched the new brand at our newly branded Episerver Ascend customer and partners conference, which took in six countries and brought together a community of close on 3,000 attendees. We also heard that we had debuted in the Forrester Digital Experience Delivery Platforms Wave, where Forrester “evaluated the best and biggest vendors in the market.”

November: As we moved firmly into the Fall Season, we announced our “Converged” Digital Experience Cloud Fall release on-time and as promised back in January – we had proved the sceptics wrong and several customers who had already made the move were able to say “come on in, the waters fine!” Since then we’ve seen many other customers on older releases join them and many more plan to.

December: Finally, as we looked to the New Year we looked back on a year where we had massively overhauled and improved our Partner Success Program and welcomed 75 new partners to our ecosystem; had become a Microsoft Managed Global ISV; and had added 75 new employees across all departments.

What a year it was, and not many companies could claim to have achieved so much in so short a time, but as I said at the start of this post, we are on a mission and it is far from complete – in fact, it has just begun.